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Real Opera
| Article
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20379 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1992 |
1,728 Words |
| Author
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Lawrence O'Toole
Lawrence O'Toole writes for Entertainment Weekly and other
national publications. |
The Ghosts of Versailles, the John Corigliano /William Hoffman opera that had its world premiere on December 19 at the Metropolitan Opera, is as close as music-drama ever gets to the circus. A revisionist backward gaze at the French Revolution, the work careens deftly, musically and in a literary sense, between camp and high drama, musical comedy and pageant, tunes and twelve-tone expression. It is a colorful, funny, complex, touching piece of work employing all the wizardry of contemporary stagecraft. It is finally, staggeringly beautiful.
The conceit behind the libretto by playwright William Hoffman (As Is) accounts for a great deal of the work's sophistication. Somewhere in a world beyond time, in a state of limbo, the ghosts of the aristocrats beheaded during the French Revolution, including the Queen Marie Antoinette, are being held up in their transport to Paradise because the late Queen refuses to accept her execution. Naturally, as is the wont of aristocrats, they are tall terribly restless and bored.
Having fallen madly in love with the ghost of the queen, the spirit of the playwright Beaumarchais (whose neck did not make the acquaintance of the guillotine and how lived in fact to an age of Camembert ripeness) decides to stage an entertainment for the spectral aristocrats and simultaneously alter history. He replots the queens hapless end in anew opera (based on an actual play by Beaumarchais, La Mare coupable), which follows the exploits of the cast of The Marriage of Figaro twenty years later.
Immediately, several things are going on at once in The Ghosts of Versailles. First there is the opera within the opera and within that, the toying around with history. This "inside" opera has a highly resonant subtext; the music of Mozart. A many tiered work the Corigliano-Hoffman opera is like a series of mirrors- new reflections, or imaginings, of two old stories- arranged with a high degree a poetic license.
The plot of The Ghosts of Versailles is quite convoluted (it seems impenetrable when one reads) full synopsis, but luckily it plays much more smoothly) and would take a month of Sundays or so to explicate. In sum, however Beaumarchais' plan to save the queen seems to be running smoothly until hits a snag; the opera within the opera character Figaro does not like how Beaumarchais has reploted the scenario and refuses to aid the escape of Marie Antoinette. Beaumarchais risks his immortal would and enters the opera as a character to try to set things right. The queen's trial is restaged in an attempt to
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